Alastair Campbell

Welcome to The Rest is Policy Leading with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And today we have with us Odd Arne Vestad, who is a professor at Yale University, but has been a very distinguished professor at many other universities around the world.

We're going to be focusing on...

on his new book, which looks at some very, very powerful questions around whether we might be on the verge of another war, and what lessons we might be able to learn from the lead up not to the Second World War, so much as the First World War, which he's got into a lot.

But he's also a very remarkable person.

He's a friend of mine.

He's a colleague of mine.

He is somebody who, as you will observe, not only speaks his own native Norwegian fluently, but fluent English, like Alistair, French and German, but unlike Alistair, also Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.

And that made him the author of an extraordinary book that I admired for many, many years on the Cold War, where he was able to do what I think very few people were able to do, which is to look at

The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union right across the world, chapters on what they did in Africa, chapters on what they did in Afghanistan, chapters on what they did in Latin America, bring the whole story together.

Ani, thank you very much for joining us today.

One of the examples that you use to try to illustrate this point is the way in which the First World War came out of the assassination in Sarajevo.

It's a very difficult thing to understand because as Alistair just pointed out, actually, in a funny way, in the summer of 1914, things felt pretty peaceful.

And many, many statesmen were looking internally at their own problems in their own countries.

They weren't particularly thinking about international affairs.

And suddenly, a guy who's the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne is assassinated.

And within a few days, we're beginning to steamroll towards war.

And

Can you try to explain what's going on there and how a place that very few, I guess, British or French citizens would ever have heard of ultimately becomes the trigger of something that leads to 40 million deaths?